Obama seeks 2012 victory via debt talks

President Barack Obama meets with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Md., from left, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Va., House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev., right, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sunday, July 10, 2011, in Washington, to discuss the debt. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

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President Barack Obama continues his two-front media campaign with a White House press conference at 11.00 a.m. Monday.

Washington’s myriad political advocates will be watching, but so too will many of the nation’s swing-voting independents, whose support he needs to win back by November 2012.

The press event will take place before Obama and GOP leaders meet again on Monday to talk about a debt-ceiling deal that will allow the federal government to continue as usual.

He’s likely to use the press conference to repeat his calls for a complex $4 trillion, ten-year debt-ceiling package that combines some as-yet-unexplained mix of tax increases, accounting shifts, program changes and spending cuts.

Republican leaders rejected that proposal on Sunday, saying it would require yet more tax increases. GOP leaders want a simpler and smaller deal that offsets $2 trillion of new borrowing with a similar amount of budget cuts.

If Obama’s package is approved, its tax increases would likely split the GOP some 17 months before the pivotal 2012 election, and the package’s enormous scale would help his allies portray him to swing voters as the president who mended the nation’s bleeding finances.

“The American people sent us here to do the right thing not for party, but for country,” he said in a July 8 Rose Garden response to the bad news that unemployment had ticked up to 9.2 percent. “So we’re going to work together to get things done on their behalf. That’s the least that they should expect of us, not the most that they should expect of us.”

If the president’s $4 trillion package stays rejected, and is supplanted by a simpler $2 trillion deal, the president can still cast himself as the only adult in Washington D.C.

“I’ve heard reports that there may be some in Congress who want to do just enough to make sure that America avoids defaulting on our debt in the short term, but then wants to kick the can down the road when it comes to solving the larger problem of our deficit,” he declared at the start of a July 5 press conference.

“I don’t think the American people sent us here to avoid tough problems,” he continued. “That’s, in fact, what drives them nuts about Washington, when both parties simply take the path of least resistance … I believe that right now we’ve got a unique opportunity to do something big — to tackle our deficit in a way that forces our government to live within its means, that puts our economy on a stronger footing for the future, and still allows us to invest in that future.”

One of Obama’s senior advisers, David Plouffe, explained the strategy at a June 7 press event organized by Bloomberg News. Obama can win the independents, he said, because they dislike partisan disputes and prefer Washington to “get away from the stale ideas of the left or right and focus on what’s going to be right for the country.” (Boehner says ambitious $4 trillion deal isn’t happening)

Obama will need whatever boost he can get, because he’s now down to 32 percent among independents, when tested head-to-head against a “Generic Republican,” according to a Gallup poll of 914 registered voters in early June. In 2008, he got 52 percent of those voters. The “Generic Republican” earned 42 percent of the independents’ votes. A quarter of the independents, or 26 percent, declined to pick Obama or the “Generic Republican.”

There’s no political downside to Obama’s two-front strategy, assuming a deal is eventually signed to prevent the federal government from defaulting on its $14 trillion debt.